Sarko's Party Projected To Win Up to 500 Seats; Leftist, Socialist, and All Other Parties Could Win As Few As 70 or So

Wow. Elections have consequences, eh? The UMP beat the Socialists by 46% to 36% -- a drubbing, to be sure, but in America, we'd still expect the losing party to have, well, something like almost half of Congress.

In France -- nope. A split like that can result in a 500-70 split.

I'm not being snarky when I say gerrymandering has its benefits. We want elections to mean something, but it's a bit scary when an 10% margin of victory can result in that sort of lopsided result. I happen to like this particular lopsided result; I'm thinking more about what would happen if the results went the other way.

It's good to see that in some ways, France and America are not so very different:

How does the Left swallow this resounding defeat? You guessed it! They blame it on the calendar, on the newly elected president, on the media, on the unbearable sorrow of their voters who can’t get over the fact that Ségolène did not win. They blame it on the voters, who don’t realize the terrible mistake they made in May and repeated in June. Sarkozy fooled them, the legislative candidates fooled them, Sarkozy’s program fooled them, the media fooled them into thinking that their candidates would lose so why bother? The Left is still shaking its fingers at voters and warning them of the dire consequences just around the corner.